Amidst the Great Depression, NYC initiated a groundbreaking housing program in 1934 to provide low-cost housing. Over 90 years, the NYC Housing Authority has housed millions in its distinct towers across the boroughs. However, within these complexes, residents face challenges in a frustrating system. The agency's rise peaked in the post-war era but declined due to federal limitations and disinvestment. Critics like Jane Jacobs highlighted social issues, questioning the design's efficacy. This lecture assesses Jacobs' critiques and others' advocacy against the reality of NYC's public housing experience, pondering the future of vibrant and affordable urban living in America.

This lecture is sponsored by Marywood University’s School of Architecture and the American Institute of Architects of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

AIA CEU Credit is available for this lecture.

Please join Joshua Berman for the next Jane Jacobs Lecture, Heritage Reanimated: Places, Objects & Memory. One of the most fundamental aspects of humanity is our association with figures - objects, people, and places that represent both an individualized and collective sense of ownership and meaning. Phenomenologically, it’s through objects and spatial associations that we come to find our way in the world. They provide a sense of orientation, anchoring points for our individual and collective sense of self. Points of contact occur between how identities take shape through our tending toward certain objects and spaces. Our moment of contact with these figures represents an energy exchange. The object or figure by itself though isn’t powerful; what makes it powerful are the values, emotions, and stories that we invest in them, and the ability to see and act through them. In simplest terms, the process of co-producing knowledge is the act of storytelling. Heritage Reanimated: Places, Objects, and Memory explores how a proposed shift in the act of historical production and collective engagement between people and the places they inhabit could promote history as a continuum allowing knowledge production to become a grassroots community-based activity.

This lecture is sponsored by Marywood University’s School of Architecture and the American Institute of Architects of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

AIA CEU Credit is available for this lecture.

This event is an in-person and virtual—in-person lecture that will be held at Marywood University School of Architecture, Shields Building. Register here for the online stream Space is limited but the event will be recorded and available on our website and YouTube channel afterward. 

Please join Arturo Pavani for the next Jane Jacobs Lecture on The Minimum Palace is a design approach that originates from a pressing question for contemporary architects: how can the current legitimate and constant increase in demand for higher standards of living and comfort coexist with the limited resources at our disposal?
Combining Karel Teige’s concept of Existenz Minimum with the aspirational design principles behind traditional Palaces, this approach identifies a few good practices that might help today’s and tomorrow’s designers navigate these challenging issues.

Please join Ryan Scavincky for the next Jane Jacobs Lecture on Media in Architecture: The Resounding Effects on Discourse. Architecture is importantly conditioned by media technology. Historically discussed in terms of film and photography, exciting revelations appear when we extend that history to include video games and social media. Through explorations and crossovers with these social technologies, this lecture Jane Jacobs Lecture uncovers new conceptions of self, domesticity, and architecture's future.

Please join Maria MacDonald, the Executive Director of the Center for the Living City and founding faculty member of Marywood University’s School of Architecture for a conversation about the trajectory of the future of Architectural Education as a collaborative endeavor and creative journey into the lab.

The Living City Lab at Marywood University addresses global challenges at a local scale, through an open ecosystem of exploration and innovative applied research shared with other institutions of higher education, and communities and replicated across disciplines. The Living City Lab is rooted in empathic responses that value sustainability and service. It comprises three key components; education [traditional coursework], projects [hands-on experiential learning], and networking [casting a wide net]. In this way, The Living City Lab catalyzes a unique opportunity for the Center for the Living City and Marywood University to co-foster emerging ideas and co-create sustainable processes and infrastructure. 

The built environment affects everyone; yet criticism continues to be a niche field, suffering through layoffs after crises, followed by more layoffs. Anjulie Rao, a Chicago-based journalist and built environment critic, discusses the need for design criticism that expands past buildings to connect with ideas, politics, and processes that infuse meaning and imagination into the places we inhabit.

Join the Center for the Living City for a conversation with journalist Jacob Steimer. When considering questions of zoning and urban design, Americans frequently fail to have an equity mindset. Jacob Steimer, who covers low-income housing for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, has spent years writing about real estate, housing conditions, and zoning fights in Memphis, Tennessee. He’ll speak about how urban planners, architects, journalists and other citizens can work toward housing that centers low-income Americans.

Join the Center for the Living City for a conversation with urbanist and Urbanistica Podcast host, Mustafa Sherif, as he invites us into the world of child-friendly cities. In this Jane Jacobs Lecture, Mustafa will take us through the importance of children in our cities, offer practical suggestions for making child-friendly cities and discuss our roles and responsibilities as architects and urban practitioners toward children and people in our cities.

Join the Center for the Living City for a conversation with dark skies advocate and photographer Bettymaya Foott, as she shows how disappearing darkness and starlight are causing or worsening many of our problems in cities and our environments. She’ll offer practical suggestions for how each of us can contribute to solutions in the design field and as community members.

Join the Center for the Living City and the Scranton Fringe Festival for our next Jane Jacobs Lecture, Site-Specific: The influence of cities and their unique locales on festivals, deviated theatre, and more. This dynamic virtual panel of festival organizers explores how their cultural programming is influenced by the cities they call home, and in turn, how their work has changed the landscape and lives of the cities/people they serve.

Join the Center for the Living City for a 2022 Jane Jacobs Lecture discussion with Tamika Butler, a national expert on the built environment and equity; Dani Simons, the Director of Public Affairs for the USDOT; and urbanist John Bela, one of the creators of Park(ing) Day, in conversation with Alison Sant, author of From the Ground Up."

In the Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody”. Today, the tactics of reclaiming the street with Parklets, Slow Streets, and Shared Spaces has exploded during the COVID Pandemic. However, these street interventions are not equally distributed. As they have spread in cities throughout the United States, they have exacerbated growing spatial inequalities. How do we reclaim streets from cars to create public spaces that serve everyone? Roads account for more than 25% of urban areas. What are they best used for and how should they be programmed?

Join the Center for the Living City for a 2022 Jane Jacobs Lecture with Marcia Feuerstein, Jodi La Coe, and Paola Zellner Bassett, co-authors of a forthcoming book Expanding Field of Architecture: Women in Practice Across the Globe in which they portray forty, beautiful and diverse architectural projects. For this presentation and discussion, they will showcase several of these award-winning urban interventions.

Join the Center for the Living City for a 2022 Jane Jacobs Lecture with Janette Sadik-Khan, one of the world’s foremost authorities on transportation and urban transformation. This discussion explores streets, cars, and transit in our communities after Covid.

Join the Center for the Living City for the first discussion in the 2022 Jane Jacobs Lecture Series, 'It Starts With Water--from the classroom to a nonprofit'. Brian Tonetti, Executive Director of the Seven Canyons Trust, will lead us through the path of envisioning, uncovering, and restoring buried and impaired creeks in Utah's Salt Lake Valley. Learn how students took a project from the classroom to a nonprofit organization. This conversation begins with the question, 'what would water do?'

Join the Center for the Living City for the last discussion in the 2021 Jane Jacobs Lecture series around the Kind of Opportunity a City Is. This discussion, led by Theresa Hyuna Hwang and Liz Ogbu is a conversation between dear friends about care, connection, and beloved community in the public realm.

Join the Center for the Living City and the Tenderloin Museum for the fourth discussion in the 2021 Jane Jacobs Lecture series around the Kind of Opportunity a City Is. This discussion, led by Kathy Looper and Randy Shaw, explores the nature of true neighborhood preservation by examining a transformative period of tenant activism in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district in the 1980s. October 13th, 4 pm Eastern/ 1 pm Pacific

Hear author Glenna Lang at an in-person lecture and slide presentation celebrating the release of her new book—Jane Jacobs’s First City: Learning from Scranton, Pennsylvania (New Village Press). Learn how Jane Jacobs’s influential ideas about vibrant cities developed through her early life in the City of Scranton. This May 4th marks what would have been Jane Jacobs’s 105th birthday and the first annual Jane Jacobs Day in Scranton.

Special guests will include Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti, architect John Cowder, and Center for the Living City director Maria MacDonald. Audience Q&A will be followed by a book signing. The socially-distanced program will take place at the spacious Theater at Lackawanna College, formerly Central High School from which Jane Jacobs (née Butzner) graduated.